


The Runaway Guest

by Sp00py



Category: Little Nightmares (Video Game)
Genre: Burning, Cannibalism, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Gore, Horror, Introspection, Mercy Killing, Overeating, POV Second Person, Vomit, autocannibalism, hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:08:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27907975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sp00py/pseuds/Sp00py
Summary: You wake up in the Maw. There's something different about you.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, Doceopercepto, for putting up with this fic in progress for as long as you have. Tags might change as chapter 2 gets written.

The woman bursts like an overripe tomato, all fetid fluids and sluicing innards. She had plunged from the upper levels, somewhere high, high above in the groaning orifices of the Maw. And now she is a steaming pile of flesh and fat. The scent wafts toward you, putrid and warm.  _ Moist _ . The contents of her stomach are only partially digested and barely chewed. There’s no time to chew when there’s more food to eat. Always more. You’re always hungry.

You drag yourself closer. Your thick fingers dig in. Fistful by fistful chunks of sausage and steak are lifted to your lips. They’re acrid with stomach juices, streaked with her blood and yellow globules of fat. You bite down. You swallow. For a second you feel the satisfaction of satiation, but it is fleeting. Another bite. Another. You’re fighting with your fellow guests to devour her faster.

What are you doing?

The thought comes unbidden. It’s alien, in a mind consumed by hunger. You pause in your feasting and look up, away from the food — from the woman. The backs of other guests roil and heave with the effort of eating, eating before someone else can take your food for themselves. It’s like an earthquake shaking hills. Another thought. When was the last time you’d seen hills?

You had come to the Maw on a boat, a gigantic luxury cruise ship packed full of you and your fellows. Before that, you… what had you done? Where had you come from? Who were you -- who  _ are  _ you now?

All you remember, all you feel, is hunger. It claws at your insides, a writhing mass of rats wanting to dig their way to freedom. The rest of the guests have gone back to their food now that the woman has been reduced to nothing but clumps of bloody hair and tattered cloth.

You remain alone beside her blood smear, surrounded by the wet slap of meat and lips, the sharp click of teeth and dishware. You want to return to feasting, as well, back to the mindless consumption, but your mind is a whirl. There’s viscera dripping down your chin and caught between your teeth, and you realize  _ this was another person _ .

Another person, perhaps someone you had seen on the boat here, had made eye-contact with and nodded and readied alongside for the feast. She had fallen, and died, and been devoured. Like she was just another meal, not a living, breathing being only minutes earlier. Your head hurts with the questions whirling, overlapping and overwhelming. Who was she? How could you -- all of you -- do that? What is  _ wrong _ with you?

You lumber away from the scene of her demise as though that could put any true distance between you and what you had done. You don’t have any destination in mind -- you only know of the dining areas of the Maw, nothing of what goes on elsewhere. But you have to escape. The sounds of the others gorging themselves sickens you, now.

Guests are piled on top of one another in rooms or plodding along in slow, laborious lines to their designated eating spaces. You go a different route.

You find a path down, a lift that disappears into a dark gullet. You don’t think you’re supposed to use it, but you’ve nowhere else to go, and it’s not blocked or barred. It’s just a single button. You press it, the doors close with the jangle of old bones, and you descend. The sounds of the dining area fade away under the mechanical churning of the elevator. It goes down into the guts of the Maw.

The door opens into a hallway that’s poorly maintained, the inner workings of the Maw on display in rusted pipes and leaky spots on the floors and dripping down the walls. You fill it with your mass, arms brushing the damp walls as you maneuver your way around pipes pumping liquids from one mysterious location to another.

There’s so much you don’t know -- about yourself, about the Maw, about this hunger gnawing at your belly even though you’ve eaten and eaten. You contemplate going back. You could so easily. Just a button push away, and you’ll be where you belong, gorging yourself and drowning your mind in wine and meat.

You don’t go back, though. You continue on, until the hall gives way to a large empty room. It seems to serve no purpose you can discern, full of more pipes up above and a drain in the middle, but nothing else. Except -- wait -- movement.

Your attention latches on to a wriggling bit of shadow that got startled from the drain. Suddenly, it’s all you can see, and all you can process. You want it. You  _ need _ it.

Your instinctive response is to snatch at the furtive, frantic little thing as it tries to skitter away, and it’s warm and wriggly inside your mouth before you even think. You swallow it whole, fur and tooth and claw and all. It doesn’t want to go down -- nothing would, not willingly -- and little paws scrabble at your gullet, writhe in your belly. Its tail is the last thing down. Like a thick, fat noodle you slurp it up.

It’s delicious. You can feel it inside of you. Suffocating, melting away, crushed by the muscles of your throat. But not dead yet, no. And that’s why it’s so much tastier than the meals prepared for you. It’s fresh. It’s alive. It’s struggling to escape, but it’s too late for that. Far, far too late. 

Your endless hunger abates a little. The rat was enough, for now, though you can still feel the hunger roiling inside, churning and gurgling even as it devours the still-squirming creature. It comes close to but just barely misses the mark for what you want. You don’t even know what you want anymore. But the rat strengthens you for now. You can continue the search. You can find what satiates this gnawing hunger.

With no particular destination in mind, you climb clumsily to your feet again and head across the room, to another opening. Always forward. All paths have to lead somewhere, right? You don’t know if that’s true either literally or figuratively, but your path has led you here now, to this moment. And it snakes off into darkness, to a set of stairs. You’re going down again. Which makes sense, as you know what’s above you but don’t know what’s below. Your gut tells you, underneath all that hunger, in a way that you've forgotten or never experienced before, that you should descend. Something is waiting for you down there.

Another elevator, another button. It gives you a moment to catch your breath after all this walking, so you gladly take it.

The scents of food -- stronger and fresher than what you’re used to -- waft up to you. Meat is cooking. Stews are bubbling. You hear the rhythmic chop, chop, chop of a knife. Your stomach growls.

The elevator opens and you totter out, peek around the corner. The kitchens. What a strange place, where food is prepared and portioned out and crafted solely to be destroyed by the gnashing flat tombstones of guests’ teeth. You’ve never considered before where the food comes from, but now realize that there must be something even past this. This process has to begin somewhere.

Fish hang from the ceiling; meats line the tables. Blood runs down to the floor and toward drains. The smells are both delightful and nauseating. Rotting flesh, old flesh. There’s so much meat, nobody could prepare it fast enough before it spoils.

It doesn’t matter if it’s spoiled or not when it goes into the pies and the pots. You and the others would eat it up anyway. Anything put before you, gone. Sickly sweet and slimy old meat disguised under flakey crusts, maggots pulsating in masses covered by spices and encased in pig intestines.

You're so hungry. It must have been at least half an hour since you ate. And there's so much food here.

Then you see the masterminds behind the meals. Two chefs, skin sloughing off their faces, work tirelessly in a haze of grease and steam. One hacks apart meat, while the other stirs a bubbling pot and throws in fistfuls of spices.

Their hands are grimy; their chef’s whites less white and more grey, brown, dingy. A strange gaping darkness sits where their faces should meet their necks. You’re seeing something you should never have seen. This was meant to be hidden from the gaze of guests like yourself, who are only here to be catered to and fed. Always, unceasingly fed.

There’s something wrong with them, in a way that twists your guts, but you find it hard to focus with so much bounty all around. Your mouth floods with saliva like a dog hearing a bell.

They’re unaware of your presence, intent on their art. Perhaps you can sneak just a taste. A nibble. A morsel of flesh from the piles mounded up around them and dripping off the tables. They wouldn’t notice a little bite gone.

Salivating, tongue lolling out as though tasting the very particles in the air and dripping strings of spit, you creep forward. You hone in on a slab of steak on the cutting block. It’s so thick, marbled with delicious fat. Blood coagulates on its air-darkened surface, coppery and rich. You can already imagine it tearing in your mouth.

Your fingers crawl toward the steak. So close. You touch it --

A blade flashes in the kitchen light, followed by a thud. You don’t even register pain. At first. You look at your fingers on the chopping block, bright red blood gushing fresh and vivid across the wood and splashed up the blade that had severed them. The blade lifts and you snatch up your wayward fingers in your other hand. In a moment, they’re in your mouth.

The bones crunch delightfully between your teeth, the blood slicks across your fat tongue and it’s  _ heavenly.  _ It drowns out the throb from your mangled hand, the blood still pumping across the table, onto the floor. It doesn’t drown out the angry squeal of the chef, though, and the realization that you’re in danger, that the blade is swinging down again -- this time toward your head -- shakes you from your euphoria.

You stumble back, your face smeared with blood, hand clutched in your other hand.  _ Now  _ you can feel the throb.  _ Now _ you feel the spike of terror.

He wants to kill you,  _ and you don’t want to die _ . You have a sudden awareness of yourself and your existence. This is something you’ve never considered before. You’ve never thought of anything but the next bite. And the next. And the next. But you have thoughts. You feel.

And now the chef wants to end that. You flail away, the knife slices through your sleeve, through your arm. It  _ hurts _ . Pain is a new sensation. Sharp and deep and unwanted, but also throbbing and slow, burning up your arm from your dismembered fingers. Confusing and frightening, you yearn to avoid it ever again.

He slashes again, screeching like a pig for his brother. You stumble into another table. Knives are embedded in heads and -- and you find yourself face to face with another guest. Nobody you knew, because you knew nobody up there. But clearly another person, even if deflated and dead. That woman hadn’t been the first taste of your own.

You wrap your good hand around the blade and yank it free. It’s heavy and square, meant for hacking through meat, hacking through bone. You slam it with all the frenetic energy of a cornered animal into the chef.

It slices through his mask and lodges in his jaw. A pink tongue flaps wildly as he gapes, fishlike, blood bubbling and spurting. The other chef is coming. Oh god. There’s two of them and one of you.

You rip out the knife and bring it down again. Again. The chef stumbles back, mask completely destroyed showing swaths of the horror underneath. Glistening, wet bone, grey cadaver skin, lipless hole of a mouth slashed through. It looks as though half of his face is already missing, far past the damage you’ve wrought.

His hands claw at his face, trying to put his mask back together, trying to hide the reality. But it’s too late. It’s too late for any of you. This ship is coming apart at the seams, stitch by stitch, spilling forth the truths you never thought about before, could never think about before. You wish you’d never realized -- never  _ noticed _ \-- 

The other chef is upon you, and you roar as you bodily throw yourself, several hundred pounds of pure panic, right into him. He trips back into the fire pit, splashing himself and you with scalding soup. It’s not enough to douse the flames catching on his clothes, on his hair, on the melting, burning flesh of his mask.

Worst of all, he gets back up. The soup pot clanks against the tiles of the floor as he drags himself from the coals. And he’s screaming. Oh god, he’s screaming like metal about to tear. Like the Maw itself shrieking. Shrill, monstrous.

He attacks, skin pink and bubbling on his fingers. He’s still on fire, but his entire focus is on you. It’s like he doesn’t even care that he’s falling apart. That his brother is falling apart. He’s single-mindedly intent on turning you into the next meal for the guests high above.

The eyes of his mask have melted into tear trails down the folds of his cheeks, leaving black, warped holes that stare sightlessly.

You break eye-contact with the glinting darkness hiding inside those holes and wheel around, gaze wild. There. A door. Closed, but you pray it’s not locked. Or that it doesn’t lead to a closet.

The handle turns in your hand, and you stumble through. Not a closet. They’re right behind -- don’t look back, don’t hesitate, just  _ run _ .

This area looks more livable. Perhaps it’s even where  _ they _ live. You fly past portraits of strange people, toilets, the Maw itself, each footfall heaving and shaking and you worry somewhere under your fear that the floor will give way. Maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll happen to the chefs.

You flee, always feeling their unsettling presence on the nape of your neck. Through another door, another lift. Such baffling designs, lifts that only go from one place to another, rooms that are so small and cramped then open into vast echoing voids. You wind through the guts of the Maw, lost and confused.

You don’t know where you are or how you got here, anymore. You just run. They’re right behind you, you’re sure. You could chop them to pieces and they’d still chase you. They’re unfeeling, unstoppable. They’re  _ monsters _ . The world is monstrous and wrong. You don’t know how you never realized it before, but now it’s all you can feel, like grease and sweat and spit licking along your skin.

So recently you were among them. Even still, perhaps. You still wanted to eat, after all, after what you’ve seen. You don’t know anymore. You know nothing but vague wisps of memories, of thoughts new yet also old, familiar. Your mind is returning to you, piece by piece, but none of them fit together quite yet. All your sharpest memories are of here and now.

As you descend yet another set of stairs, a pipe bursts and fetid water splashes across you. You startle, slip, fall. Instead of the steady, careful step by step you’ve taken before you bounce and roll. It’s terrifying, a wall to your right, empty nothingness to your left. So easily you could careen off the edge and splatter like the woman at the bottom of the pit below.

You land particularly hard on the rickety stairs and they groan, splinter, shatter. You plunge down to the stairs a level below and continue on your wild ride, body slamming down and rebounding into the air again. Your stomach churns and clenches with each moment suspended in the air, and you’re sure you’ve left your heart somewhere several stories up.

Your terrifying journey is brought to an abrupt halt as you collide with a bulwark. Unlike the wooden stairs, it doesn’t give. You fall into an unkempt heap, your once nice suit spattered in fluids black, red, and clear, buttons missing and jacket torn. Your body feels more abused than your clothes, and you’re sure bruises are blossoming underneath your layers.

You lay on your back, staring up into the endless darkness of the Maw, listening to the heavy gurgling of your gut and thudding of your heart aligning with the Maw’s noises. Pain. Everywhere. Blood oozes sluggishly from your nose and hand. A tooth feels loose. You’re hungry again.

There was a time when you weren’t always hungry. You grasp to that thread, and follow it backwards to a faded tapestry of a life before the Maw. You had family, a home, a life untouched by struggle, but defined by the largesse of life. And your family disappeared slowly over the years, as families often do. Your parents went on a voyage in their finest clothes when you were a child, and you were raised by nannies and tutors, paid for from the coffers of their vast estate, and they never returned. As parents often do. You think you should feel  _ something _ to know what happened to them, what almost happened to you, but you don’t. You’re numb.

You have to move. The chefs can find you.

With the greatest of efforts you drag yourself to your feet. Unsteady, weak from hunger and blood loss. While you weren’t always hungry long before you undertook your own voyage, now you are. It eats away at your belly. Perhaps you will always be.

Something scampers away, and your attention latches on it like a predator after prey. A rat? No, something more ungainly and upright. A little pointed hat, clumsy little hands. It looks like crumpled old paper. It doesn’t exactly scream food, but it moves. It’s alive.

If you eat it, you’ll have strength. You can continue your journey…. Somewhere. Anywhere. Away from the nightmare. If there is an away.

You chase after the little creature, which runs right into a wall in its fear, allowing you to snatch it up in your meaty fist before it can climb through a hatch you can’t even fit your hand in. It wriggles frantically, terrified. You clamp your mangled hand over it, caging it between your fingers.

Yes, you need to eat.

The little thing is trembling now. You open your hands just a bit and press your eye against the gap formed by your fingers. It takes a moment to see in the gloom, but the creature has disappeared into its crumpled hat.

Fear. You recognize that easily now. You feel it in your own thudding heart, in the sour taste in your mouth. Your thick tongue slips out to wet your lips. So, so easily you could pop it into your mouth and crunch down on its dry papery little body. You can already imagine it, tasteless and brittle. You want to eat it terribly. And that’s when you realize you  _ want _ to eat it, not  _ need _ to. The hunger can be denied. It can be told no. You don’t have to be a cause of such terror. You wish... you wish you had realized that before.

You open your hands fully so that the creature is sitting there, confused now, in the cup of your palms. You’ve gotten some blood on its cap, the only splash of color. You set it down and it scurries off, this time making it over the threshold of the hatch. You don’t blame it for running.

The hunger is still there, still grumbling like a living creature of its own, but you push it away. You’re freer than you’ve ever felt. Not entirely broken of the shackles of hunger, the compulsion. But you didn’t eat that creature. You denied your hunger. _You_ did that.

You don’t have to eat eternally. You can breathe. You can go your own path, not tread paths chosen for you by the Lady and the guests before you, from cradle to Maw to someone else’s plate.

Only… you don’t know where to go. You might have pushed down the hunger (and you realize that, realistically, eating that creature wouldn’t have undone the damage caused to you by the chefs), but you still have so many aches and pains, so many scalds and cuts. Your fingers are missing though at least their stumps have stopped bleeding so vigorously as before. Now they simply ooze, tired as you are. But you should stopper it even more, if you can. You know this without knowing how. Simple self-preservation, a feeling you’ve never had before. You’ve never needed it.

You take your napkin that has been tucked up under your many chins and wrap it around your hand. It will do for now.

You won’t escape unscarred, if you can even escape at all. For all you know, the Maw has descended again into the ocean as it does once all its guests arrive, and you’re deep, deep below the waves. How were you meant to leave? Even before you finish the thought, you realize you weren’t. None of you were. This was meant to be your tomb. One you had willingly -- eagerly -- entered. There’s no guarantee you’ll make it out, even now. Your awareness might have come too late for your life.

You’re going to die. You almost did die, already. Repeatedly. The thought hits you with the force of the ocean groaning beyond the walls, and with it a wave of nausea. Death is all around you, and inside you and about to consume you.

You take an unsteady step forward. It’s all you manage before you’re doubled over, heaving. Bits of rat, fingers, blood and gore, splash out across your shoes and drip down onto your coat. Everything you’ve eaten, expelled.

You vomit again, and again, until you’re on your hands and knees, spitting up yellowish-green bile instead of food. It dribbles from your lips, connecting you to a grisly picture book of your journey so far. It starts where you left off -- your fingers. Mashed, broken, bone white and splintered. Then the rat, or what’s left of it. Its head is half gone and its brains have poured out, lost somewhere in the squelching mash of meat, but a single eye stares balefully at you, judging you for your cruelty. You can see its little teeth, its ribs, matted fur and a mess of organs. The rest must have come from your previous meals and the woman you -- you ate. You’ve eaten other guests, too, but far removed from their true forms. It had been fine, not knowing. It had been good.

You totter, the world spins, and you plop yourself back against the wall. This is too much. You feel all hot and swollen, stuffed full of thoughts but empty of belly. The faint lights that are filtering through the Maw splinter into rainbow fractals as tears well up, big and fat and sloppy. They spill over your cheeks, splash down onto your trembling, heaving chest as you try to steady your breathing. Your head throbs, your hand aches, your guts are clenching and unclenching as though trying to purge you of your tainted innards.

It had been good, not knowing. This is terrible. You’re miserable. Your life had turned from a blissful haze of food into a waking nightmare, all leading to the same end, regardless.

Your stomach growls, unbothered by the chaos in your mind. All it knows is that it’s empty, and it shouldn’t be.

You take the napkin from your mangled hand and dab its crusty, blood-stained edge against your face. You’re in too deep, and you have no clue how to proceed. So, for now, you don’t. You wallow, instead.

You wonder if you can go back -- somehow, some different way, because the path you took is littered with broken stairs and dangerous, violent creatures. There’s no way, really, but you can hope and dream. You can imagine just returning to your table and food, none the wiser, none the hungrier for _something_ , you still don’t know what, beyond food.

You want that so badly. You don’t want to know, you don’t want to remember yourself. You don’t want to remember how lonely the world is, how lonely you’ve always been. Even surrounded by people at parties, at concerts, at dinners. You were alone. You all were. And you went on this journey to fill that void, that hunger. Now you’re more alone than ever. You don’t even have the illusion of company, the comfort of food.

If you died down here, nobody would know. If you died up there, nobody would care.

You cry, and cry, tasting salt from your tears, tasting grease and soot and blood and acid. It’s all so sour and vile on your tongue, this flavor of pain and suffering you’d somehow never noticed your entire life.

Something clatters, jerking you from your misery. The chefs -- no -- your eyes roll wildly, whale-white and terrified, but you don’t see them. Instead, there’s a little figure on a grate that must have fallen from one of the pipes in the ceiling. They lay there, so tiny, just a crumple of fabric and messy dark hair.

You wonder if they might be dead, and it distracts you from your own impending death. With herculean effort you drag yourself to your feet and limp over. There’s the faintest rustle of their fabric. Grunting, head spinning with the shift in position, you kneel beside the figure and gently scoop them into your uninjured hand. Not one of those little, grey creatures. Warmer. Softer.

A child. Yes, you remember when you were this little. When the world seemed so big and scary, and everyone else knew so much more than you. And then you’d grown up, and you were big and knew everything -- or you should have. But you realize now that you never felt like you knew anything, no matter how big you got. You just drifted through life, until you woke up, and the world was still so much bigger than you and endlessly, violently terrifying. Perhaps that was why adults pretended to know everything, why it was easier to simply follow the others into the Maw and lie to yourself that this was what you wanted, because admitting you didn’t, and that nothing was in your control…. That was frightening on a profound, existential level.

The boy groans and shifts in your palm. You frantically set him down and shuffle back, not wanting to frighten him. Children should have smaller fears, of closet doors opened a crack and imaginary monsters under the bed, but if a child is here, then they have very large, very real monsters to face.

You watch like a fearful rabbit, ready to run at the first sudden movement. But the boy is slow to wake up, disoriented. It takes a moment for him to find your figure in the gloom, and the instant he tenses, you raise your hands and try to smile through the blood and bruises. You make some quiet, hopefully calming gestures and noises. You don’t want him to run. You don’t want to be alone.

Though you probably look more terrifying than comforting, he doesn’t run. You can see the fear on his face, as there’s zero attempt to hide how he feels. That’s a skill people learn later. The false smiles, the pleasantries that mean nothing. But he’s also bloodied and bruised. He’s probably as tired of running as you are, but infinitely younger.

You sit heavily against a wall, and let the boy make the next move. He watches you warily as he climbs to his own feet and assesses the situation. You hope he stays, but you already see him identifying the next path forward.

He scrambles through the same hatch the creature went through, and you give a faint farewell noise that chokes in your throat. You’re happy for him, that he’s continuing his own escape. You really are. You hope he makes it out.

Tears well again at the sudden crashing isolation. You’d only know him for a minute, so it’s silly to feel so strongly about him leaving, but you do, because you’re still here, and you’ll stay here. This is where you’ll die, and rot, and be eaten by rats and bacteria and, eventually, the Maw itself until there’s nothing left of you and nobody remembers you.

The hatch swings open entirely with an agonized screech, and you frantically wipe at the tears on your face, trying to clear out your vision for whatever new nightmare awaits.

The boy hops down from the hatch’s lip, and you stare at him in confusion. Resolution is set in his face, scrunched up as though he can’t believe he’s doing this either, but he does it. He approaches you and takes your hand. Or tries to. His hand is so, so tiny, he settles on just wrapping his fingers around your pinky. You can only gawk as he tugs you, urging you to get up. And you do.

You have no strength in your bones, and your muscles feel like pulverized gelatin, but you lumber to your feet and follow the boy through the hatch. You don’t know where he’s taking you, but you had nowhere else to go, anyway.

Neither of you talk, though you feel as though you’d not understand each other anyway, a linguistic gap of years between you.

The boy leads you along, always finding a way to get you though when it seems no path should be possible. He’s clever. Far more clever than you, who’ve spent your life in a gluttonous haze, and whose brain is heavy and corpulent. You respect that, and are envious of it. You know, deep down, you’d never want to endure what he has, but your own childhood was lazy and lugubrious, and, ultimately, aimless, to the point that it took a monster trying to cleave off your face for you to realize you’re in a dangerous, deadly place.

You travel a winding path that’s not really one path, but many, many disjointed routes, and as though taking pity on you, the Maw opens up. You’re so deep down, you can feel water pressing in from the walls, a thin skin of metal separating you from a horrific, crushing death. Everything vibrates with the deep, animalistic growl of machinery older than time.

The boy crawls through a vent, and you wait for the door to open. And you wait. And wait.

Discomfort settles in your stomach, unrelated to your hunger, or your own woes, or your own, personal yearnings. Fear, which you know, but not for yourself. For him. You wait. He’s been so prompt until now. He knows this place, and how to maneuver it. He's not returned.

Something is wrong, and you can do nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

No, you’re no longer a passive participant in life. You can do something. You  _ have to _ .

Frantically, without plan or thought, you slam on the door, a plaintive wail escaping your lips. Then there, a noise! You latch onto the faint sound that you might have just imagined. He sounded scared. There is so much to fear here, but you can protect him -- you can save him --

You throw yourself against the door. It groans, but doesn’t budge. If you can’t -- if you can’t save one, single child -- 

Again. Metal screeches, buckles. It can’t stand against your panic, this time not for your own life, not like the chefs, but for the boy and whatever dangers he’s encountered trying to help you pass through.

_ Again _ . The door slams open, hard enough to bounce off the wall with a deafening clatter, before sagging, one hinge broken.

Your eyes scour for the boy, only seeing slimy black leeches lurching blindly across the floor. They’re heading away, toward a shadowy cage. He’s on top of it, and frantically gestures at you -- either to save him or get away, you’re not sure. You’re saving him, though.

The leeches squelch and pop beneath your feet. Some latch onto your skin through fabric, pinpricks of pain radiating from them as you drag them with you. Before, any pain was to be avoided at all costs, life lived only in the comfort of gluttony and sedation, but you’ve seen and endured so much in such a short time. These leeches are nothing to you, and yet… What is simply a mild irritation to you is life or death to him.

You scoop the boy up in your mangled hand, and with your other you rip the leeches off. It hurts worse, flesh tearing, their vile saliva burning into open wounds. Your shoulder throbs, bruises on top of bruises.

The leeches that aren’t killed slink away down drains and between cracks. The boy’s small fists curl into your shirt collar, and his breath flutters in panic. Once you decide you’re safe enough, you gently disengage him to check for injuries. You find some black ooze, but no blood. A sigh of relief escapes, and you hug his small form carefully, mindfully. He hugs you back.

It’s strange, how he trusts you and you trust him. Neither of you had any reason to at the start, and you’ve not spoken a single actual word (it feels as though you are from two different worlds, and perhaps you are), but what else is there to do down here than trust and hope and try to survive?

The boy gestures to be let back down. You acquiesce, but not without some hemming and hawing. He takes charge again. Life and death are, disgustingly, a normal dichotomy for him. You’ll do your best to change that, though you have no idea how.

You wonder where he is taking you, as the halls get crowded, and cages begin to appear in piles, lining the rooms you’re taken through. It smells like old food, and you hate to think that you still associate these children with  _ food _ . But you’re still a little hungry. Not in that famished, gluttonous way you abandoned, but by habit. A simple, natural desire to sustain yourself.

He brings your attention to a cage with a child inside of it, hunched and terrified, wearing rags. Their eyes are shiny and dark with fear as they gaze upon you. You try to smile in comfort, but it’s like communicating with a dog who views that as bared teeth and a threat. The boy pulls on the lock, not to get it open, but to guide you in what you must do.

You grasp the side of the cage in one hand, and twist your fingers between the bars of the door. Mindful of the fragile life inside, you pull and grunt and twist, metal screaming, your fingers aching. If you had been trying to get at some food, you’d easily rend the entire cage apart, but that’s not your goal. You want to help. You need to do some good to pay for all the suffering you participated in.

Bolts ricochet into the darkness, and you flop back onto your backside as the door gives. The child is clinging to the far corner. You set the cage down as carefully as you can and back away, so they know you’re not a threat. The boy coaxes them out, and they immediately run away. You, feeling like a child yourself, look to him for guidance. He seems to accept that response, and the two of you are off. More children, more cages. Your fingers are bruised in the joints, and your knuckles are bloody from sharp edges. But children are free. They run and hide, having learned not to trust adults. As well they should. Even you don’t trust adults, anymore.

Then, you come across something you can’t overcome by sheer physical might. At least not without panic driving you. Doors, large and reinforced with metal. A row of them, and probably more that you haven’t found yet. You bend and press an eye to the tiny window. Children are trapped inside. Many of them, bunked up, huddled up.

You try the doorknob, but are unsurprised when it doesn’t turn. The boy looks expectantly at you, as though being an adult comes with the ability to solve problems (and it should, shouldn’t it? Or at least the responsibility to  _ try),  _ and you shrug helplessly, then point at the keyhole.

He frowns, and you feel as though you’ve failed him, failed all the others. You’ve never tried to succeed at anything, before, and failure is a new, alien sensation that twists in your stomach and clenches at your heart, especially with so much at stake.

There has to be a key somewhere, right? With some other adult, who tends the children. You hold your hand up for him to wait, and continue on, searching for any signs of a caretaker.

You wander where your great bulk is permitted, through tall, tall rooms suited for tall, thin people. You see dolls, and clocks, and books -- all evidence of hobbies, of a life. It’s more of a life than you’ve seen anywhere else, or that the children trapped behind heavy metals doors have had a chance to have. It’s so strange to think of having interests beyond eating, but they are all around you.  _ You _ have interests outside of your own gluttony, now. You have children to rescue, as many as you can.

You keep accidentally knocking things over, the dolls and books and clocks, and they all make noises. Clunks, thunks, and a cacophony of agonized chimes, shattering glass, that will surely alert any adults nearby of your treachery.

Nobody ever comes, though there are so many things to suggest people should. Electrified bars across doors tall enough for adults. Tools that would fit your hands, toilets. But nobody else. It puts you at ease, while your mind screams you should be constantly alert. This far down, though, with the warm stink of sewage wafting from pipes, and rats galore, adults seem scarce. This ship (this creature?) has no crew, no maintenance being done on it. Only food ( _ children _ ), and only those to prepare the food, or eat the food.

It feels lonely. Echoing and dark and dying. Whether this is caused by the depths you must be in the ocean by now, or the decrepitude of such an ancient beast, or something else, it makes you sad for the Maw, for yourself, but especially for the children. This is no home, but you don’t know where home is for them.

You come to a place wide open but for trash littered around -- a flipped bed, boxes, dolls, and miscellany. A spotlight shaped like an eye glows to life and begins swinging back and forth, as though it can sense your presence. There’s something strange about the dolls that gives you pause. They’re not laying around like normal toys, or propped on stands or behind protective glass. They’re more like statues, tiny, carved into the likeness of terrified children. This one is mid-run, that one’s curled on their side, arms around their head, another’s crouching, turned away from some unknown horror. The spotlight swings over them, jerky, lingering, as though it’s alive.

Not an unknown horror. The eye.

Stupidly, you hold your hand out into its path, and it immediately latches on to the movement. You feel a coldness setting in, ice stinging up your arm, as you yank it back, leaving a trail of dust floating in the air.

Your hand has a layer of more dust, and it hurts to move the joints. You flex to get feeling back in, as though blood has stopped flowing, and the dust falls away, revealing shiny pink new skin. Why? In a ship full of horrors, why do they need eyes like these? There’s electricity crackling through bars, locks on doors too large for children to open in the first place, traps for rodents and children alike. Chains and monsters gorging themselves on children down here. The eye seems excessively cruel, especially judging by the poor, tiny statues around it.

You swing your own gaze around for something to pick up -- ah, a little wooden block almost too large for a child to easily pick up, as though the designers had forgotten what children even looked like. You wrap it in your fist and storm over to the eye. It swings its baleful glare toward you, but you clear the distance easily before petrification can set in, until you’re underneath it.

With toy in hand, you use the edge to smash against the pupil. The eye blinks shut, which horrifies you, but doesn’t stop you. You hit it through the lid, denting metal (oh thank god, you probably would have lost your nerve if it had been fleshy and soft, like a real eyelid), Something cracks, but you’ve learned to be thorough in your destruction of these horrors. You bash until the lid can’t even open anymore, and every spasm of it generates a gentle chiming of broken glass from behind it.

You drop the block, fingers aching from how hard you’d been gripping it, and regard the poor, frozen children in the gloom. Gingerly, you reach out to touch one, thinking maybe you can lay them to rest or -- or something. Anything. What rituals were there even for the dead, when they’ve died like this?

The child dissolves instantly to dust, and the others follow suit as though a ghost had blown through and whisked them all away.

You rub at your eyes a little, banishing tears that want to well, and hope they’ve found some peace now that their bodies have crumbled away. You were too late to save them in life. There’s nothing more you can do for them in death.

You develop a routine as you search. If there are children, you free them. If there are dangers, you do your best to rip them or break them, so they can’t harm anyone else. And there are so many dangers designed intentionally to harm children, to keep them corralled until feeding, huddled in fear to the point where that’s all they must know.

You wish you could say you don’t understand how people could turn a blind eye to such evils, but you know all too well how easy it was. You’re just as guilty, and that guilt eats at you with every door you can’t open, and every child who flees the instant they’re able. The only difference is that you alone are drowning in your guilt, while the others thrive on it, if they feel anything at all.

More children are saved, though there are so many empty cages and beds, and so many years of feasting, that an uncountable number more have been lost. You don’t like how it hurts, how you know you’re not personally to blame, but it feels like this is all your fault. All you can do is push onward, forcing yourself through doors not meant for your bulk.

You walk into a pair of legs.

The body they’re attached to sways gently. You step back, eyes wide, immediately fearing an attack. The body continues to sway, moving only with the undulation of the ship. You squint up into the gloom trying to make out more of the figure, but all you get are long arms, long legs, a long torso and a face you cannot see well at all. Long limbs would make sense for the tall, narrow things you’ve seen so far. Is this the children’s caretaker?

There’s a chair on the floor, the only one of its kind, while the rest also hang. You have an immediate, sinking suspicion of what had happened. Suicide is something spoken of in gossip, hinted at in obituaries, scorned and mocked by those who have never been in such dire straits as to crave it. You remember laughing along behind wine glasses and fans, having no troubles in your life to teach you empathy.

A paper, the closest thing to white you’ve seen ever since your own napkin became caked in blood and filth, lays on the floor. With clumsy effort, you crouch down, scoop it up, and squint at the blurry sentences.

You recognize the structure of salutations and closings, a body full of waterlogged words. The lines all slant and shake, written hastily or with great difficulty, but an eloquence you wouldn’t have expected so far in the depths of hell.

> My Lady,
> 
> I’m sorry for what I have, by now, done. I’m ashamed that it has come to this, that I’m leaving you without a caretaker for the children.
> 
> But the children. I can’t do it anymore. I watch them grow, year after year. I provide them with toys, with food, with care. And they’re taken away, year after year. They’re food for your customers, their souls -- I can’t do it.
> 
> These are my children, yet they’re afraid.  _ We _ make them afraid. Once, they laughed and played, unknowing of the fate awaiting them, but now they are silent and sullen. Somehow, they learned what they are for, and I can no longer provide the illusion of comfort. They’d rather face the unknowns of the Maw than let me care for them. I can no longer bear their judgements. I hear their cries in my sleep, the rattling of their chains, the shuffling of those horrid, papery husks.
> 
> I know this is the way of the world, and I am a weak-hearted man for letting it affect me so. I hope you can forgive this inconvenience to you.
> 
> Please find someone who loves the children like I did. But someone who is stronger, who can do what must be done, for you and for the Maw.
> 
> Yours in death as in --

  
The name, written with great flourishes, is damaged beyond recognition. A suicide note, then. Given the fact that it’s still here, and the children are now in cages, you suspect it never made it to its intended reader. You can’t imagine the woman overseeing you and the other guests coming aboard would ever come down this far, anyway. 

It is a cold comfort that you’re not alone in understanding the horrors you’ve help enact on these children, as the only other to show that sort of compassion is now hanging from a rope. He  _ was  _ weak, you decide, if all he thought to do was lie to the children and hide what was to happen to them, then kill himself when he couldn’t handle his own culpability. You refuse to accept this is simply how the world is, or that the Maw has to feed. (Did it eat the children, as you once did, or eat you, once you’d been lured and corrupted even further? Did it matter, when the result was deaths upon deaths?)

You hate the Maw, the woman who reigns here and who invited you aboard, the chefs and guests who mindlessly, endlessly prepare and devour food. No longer does the Maw’s dying groans make you sad. You feel relief. It needs to die. This needs to end. The caretaker was wrong, thinking this was how the world simply was and would forever be.

You crumple the note and shove it into your pocket, a reminder of what you cannot do. The amends you must make aren’t to the Maw, or to the Lady, but to the children.

You turn to leave the man, but pause, then regard him once more. If he was once their caretaker, perhaps  _ he  _ would have a key to their rooms.

With some hesitation, as though you’ve not touched things more vile, you reach up and pat around his waist. Something hard is in his pocket. It jangles, and you stretch on your toes to force your fingers inside and yank out what you hope is -- yes! 

The key ring fumbles out of your hand and to the floor. You scrabble to pick it up and examine the few keys on it. There’s nothing to distinguish one from the other, except to try them.

You leave the caretaker swinging from his rope, to do what he could not.

You unlock the first door you find, feeling as though the world is at your fingertips. There are children on beds, all suspiciously, conspicuously asleep. If that is what they do to stay safe, you won’t begrudge them that. You creep in as though trying not to disturb them, and find the glint of chains in the darkness. Here, there, one by one emaciated ankles are freed.

Once you’re sure all who are chained are loose, you slink out, leaving the door wide open. You wish you had more to offer them. Food, or warm clothes, or something, but freedom will be a start.

More, and more rooms -- too many children, but all now free. You’re feeling quite accomplished, until you encounter the cages.

None of the keys work, and though you’ve broken many already, your strength is flagging. You’ve destroyed so much down here, and it was all worth it so that children could travel safely, but you stare mournfully at the huddled forms, struggling even to bend the bars now. You can’t be too rough, either.

There must be another key, then. Some new caretaker was hired, someone crueler, who sets traps and locks children in cages instead of chaining them to beds. The one with all the hobbies, then. You can’t imagine the original caretaker actually  _ living _ down here.

You reunite with the boy and free his friends, who scatter. Soon, all the doors here are open, and you point at a cage and spread your hands wide, shaking your head sadly. The child inside the cage looks on in horror, as though you’ll abandon them here because you can’t free them easily. But you silently promise to return.

After a moment’s thought, the boy darts into a room and comes out again with crayons. With some effort and many broken tips, he draws a long-armed, squat figure on the wall. The new caretaker, then. Also long, but in a different way than the old.

You pocket the keys and nod resolutely. You’ll find this caretaker and relieve him of his keys, by whatever means necessary.

The boy comes with you, which you are both surprised about, as he seemed excited to be with other children, but also relieved. You’ve been all throughout these lower levels, and haven’t seen a single hair or long, long arm.

As you pass ways you’ve been before, the boy looks in shock at the destruction you’ve caused. No more eyes, no more sparks, no more traps. It makes your search that much easier.

There is, somehow, still  _ more _ below. Past the children, past wrapped up bodies and circling meathooks and endless, gaping voids full of the echoing clang of distant machinery.

The boy doesn’t seem to know where the caretaker has gone, either, but he is full of vigor and never pauses for more than a moment to contemplate his next course of action. You wave to him to get his attention, and sit on the floor with a great sigh. He jogs over and stands at your knee, looking up at you in curiosity.

You wipe sweat from your brow and try to catch your breath. That’s enough indication for him to pat your knee and disappear again. You worry about him, but you are also reaching a limit you thought you’d hit forever ago.

He returns shortly, as though to check that you’re still there, and that you know he’s fine, and gives you a thumbs up, before disappearing down another route. Vents, chains, cracks in doors, all are entrances for one as wily as him. The boy never seems to go too far, and constantly returns, which assauges your worry somewhat.

Eventually, the boy comes back with renewed energy, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as he pulls your pant leg. This can only mean he found something of interest, or something he needs your help with.

You climb to your feet with an exaggerated groan (though only slightly exaggerated), and are rewarded with a stifled almost-giggle. The boy runs ahead, and leads you down into more pipes, but fewer doors or blocked passageways. There are only hatches already opened, as though someone had come through.

Then you smell it. Death -- more death, fresh death. Blood, pain. Before, that meant food. Now, you resist the salivation, the impulse to eat.

It’s accompanied by sickly, sucking noises all slightly out of sync with one another. You recognize it, though not in such quantity, and immediately pick up the boy before you advance.

You find the source easily enough, along a track lined with boxes, bags, and barrels. Some sort of supply cart, you must assume. Dark splatter begins to appear on the floor, coalescing into puddles, into leeches wallowing in clumpy, coagulated blood. You step around them, holding the boy aloft as though the leeches will sense him and hunt him down. They barely even give you any mind, even when you occasionally trod on their brethren.

Soon, you find the source of all the blood. Without his arms and coated in a writhing, heaving mass of leeches, he’s almost unrecognizable, but this must be the caretaker. Or what is left of him. Something has torn off his arms, and the leeches saw to the rest.

With a grimace, you swat away leeches and try to find the waist of his pants. He jerks and moans, teeth clicking at your wrist. You jerk back with a yelp, echoed by the boy.

What you’d taken for a cooling corpse is still very much alive. His chest heaves under the weight of the leeches as they feast, mouth working as though to form words. There are no eyes you can see, hidden behind folds of flesh scrunched down his skull. But he knows you’re there, if his pathetic jerking in your direction is any indication.

You… you want to help him. He’s a monster, you know this. And even if you didn’t, the boy’s reaction would clue you in. Yet he’s suffering. The leeches are eating him alive, growing swollen with his viscera, and without his arms, with blood oozing sluggishly from the stumps, he can do nothing to stop it.

You sway in indecision, and the boy makes a noise like he can’t believe this even up for debate. The man is a monster. Monsters don’t deserve sympathy.

You were a monster too, though. You ate, and ate, and ate. You ate a woman, you ate living rats and your own fingers. You would have eaten the boy, if you’d met even an hour before you did.

You could never excuse what this man had done, what the previous caretaker had, what you yourself had. But you could spare some sympathy for his current state. Even monsters can be afraid.

This one won’t survive his wounds, full of anticoagulants from the leeches, too great a trauma to ever recover from regardless. He’ll bleed out slowly, drained drop by agonizing drop.

You kneel down and push your hand through the mass of leeches, a grimace twisting up your face. The boy clings fearfully to your sleeve, and you turn your body so he doesn’t have to see what you’re about to do, doesn’t have to be too close to the leeches.

You find a weak jawline, trembling, clicking. Down, then. A throat, pulse fluttering, skin loose. Your thick fingers fit easily around the majority of his neck.

You breathe deeply of rotting blood and leeches, close your eyes, and squeeze.

The man spasms, gurgling, as though trying to thwart this new danger, but he is dying and you are very much alive. You feel more than hear something crunch, and his throat gives way underneath your palm. He jerks once more, then stills.

You pull your hand away, and it feels like someone else’s. But you don’t have time to contemplate what you’ve done. You find the keys, stand, and leave his cooling corpse, swallowing the confusing roil of emotions. You did the right thing, you know this, both for him and for the children, but… you killed someone who was no threat to you. You’re a murderer.

Once you’re far enough from the leeches, you set the boy down again. Your rescue can begin in earnest once more, because, as you soon discover, while you only had the keys to a few locks before, you now seem to have the key to  _ every _ lock. A skeleton key for cage, for cell, to open passage for all the children.

The boy helps where he can, getting to cages beyond your reach, coaxing children out when they fear you too much to move.

Little by little, they become braver. A girl begins to follow the boy, then a younger one who takes her hand. Another. Another. Children who had run and hid before inch out of cracks and from underneath beds. What was once a single, brave child, willing to be kind and willing to trust, becomes a line of children mindful of holes, helping one another. You’re lead to some with legs twisted from falls gone bad, or cut up feet. They can’t walk, but you can carry them in pockets and in your arms.

You find a lift up to the kitchen and leave the boy to sooth his fellows as you check for the chefs. They’re there, but still and cold. You crowd as many children onto the lift as you can, and take them up, drop them off, return for more. Finally, finally you feel as though you’re accomplishing something. No set-backs, no barred doors.

They descend upon the vegetables and breads and fish scattered everywhere like a hoard of, well, starving children. You don’t know much about children, but hope they have the presence of mind to avoid things that look once human, or rancid and rotting.

Once they are all in the kitchens, you take a moment to just breathe, and eat something (no meat,  _ just in case _ ) yourself. Though things are rotting, it’s warm here, and the air is full of spices.

Soon enough, you find yourself missing open air, untainted by machine oil or blood. You’re almost there.

You leave the children to their celebrations, and retrace your steps. As you take the lift back up, you’re greeted not by the expected sounds of gluttony and celebration, but by complete and utter silence. Then the smell, more rot, more death. Had it smelled like that from the beginning? You can’t recall. The time when you had first set foot on this elevator feels so far away and foreign, as though it’s a story you were told and only remember parts of.

The door opens, and you step out to a mass grave. Bodies are slumped over tables, or splattered on the ground as though fallen from the higher seats. They look like they died in the middle of bites, almost simultaneously.

Your breath hitches. After eating people and killing people, you’d think you’d be inured to such mindless death, but the sheer scale of it, the faces so like your own staring blankly with eyes greying and flies buzzing -- you stumble back onto the lift, close the door, and sink to the ground.

After what feels like an eternity, the lift begins to descend. You hadn’t pressed anything, but you let it happen. The door opens to the boy standing there inquisitively.

You don’t know how to convey that everyone you knew, or thought you knew, is dead. He probably knows enough of his own kind dying to understand, regardless, and he comes in and pats your arm comfortingly, without you having said a thing.

The boy throws a shoe at the door, it closes, and you ascend again.

You don’t want to go up there. You don’t want to see them again. You don’t want to, but you know you have to. There are children waiting, and the food won’t last forever. They need to go somewhere, anywhere that’s not the Maw.

You think, suddenly, of your own home. Full of rooms but empty of life. When your parents had gone on their journey to the Maw, there was nobody but you and your minders to fill the halls. Then, as you grew older and more independent, they’d left, too. All your fortune still lay in land and accounts. All those rooms are still there, waiting for occupants. You’d never had children of your own to follow in your cursed footsteps. You’d never wanted to. Children were just nuisances, needy for attention when you had your own gluttonies to satiate. Selfish. Disconnected.

You decide, now, to think about the children having a safe home and not the bodies around you. The boy treads carefully between corpses, and sometimes casts a worried glance back at you when he has to clamber over a hunched, still back.

You wave him along. You’ll survive. You have to.

Suddenly, the scent of salt, fresh from the ocean. You look up. A doorway is open, letting sunlight and breezes in. The boy follows your gaze. It’s so far away, but you’ve traveled miles and ages already. You’re a new being than what you once were, than these many, many corpses surrounding you. You let yourself feel hope. You’ll survive, and the children will survive, too.

You and the boy begin navigating a maze of bodies that, despite your newfound hope, you have to steadfastly refuse to look too closely at. Up. Up and out, that’s the goal. It’s nice, having your path so cleanly lain out before you.

You glance down at the boy, who runs ahead with an enviable level of bounce, as though he was a flower and just needed the sun to bloom.

It is as you’re watching him ascend steps dripping with bodies that he slips. A puddle of fluids leaking from a guest glistens innocently as you instinctively lunge forward to catch him at the first breath of a cry.

Your eyes connect. Your hand stretches down as his stretches up. You miss.

He screams.

He screams, and screams, and then there’s a sudden, crushing silence.

It had taken only a second, but his face flickering from hope to fear to blinding, mind-numbing terror lingers like an afterimage in your eyes. His movements warping from reaching toward you to scrambling futilely at air. Both of you powerless to do anything, to even have time to process it. And then he disappears, almost instantly but somehow also with aching slowness, into the hazy darkness below. Your arms are still outstretched, and the edges of the stairs are digging into your belly.

He’s gone. It feels unreal, but you’re suddenly so horribly empty, like you’ve been hollowed out, worse than your hunger has ever been because this  _ hurts.  _ Your lungs ache, your heart clenches. You feel sick.

He’s gone, he’s gone,  _ he’s gone. _

You’ve never lost anyone important to you before. No parents, no tutors, no cooks or maids or caretakers. Come, go, alive, dead, none of them had mattered.

The boy had mattered. He mattered more than you thought a single person could.

You push yourself into a sitting position, replaying those final, nightmarish moments over and over again. Perhaps he’s still alive, you think irrationally, though you know the dangers of heights, you heard his cries cut off so sharply. You know he’s dead, even if you fight the mere thought. You want to cry, but tears won’t come. You want to scream, but your breath chokes in your throat. You want to lash out and hurt this monster that had hurt you, that killed  _ your  _ boy.

But even in that, you’re powerless. The Maw is so much bigger than you, so incomprehensible. What can you do to a beast that’s been surviving for years -- for centuries? All you can do is breathlessly sob into your hands, tasting the rot of death, the stinging pain of loss.

Thin wailing slips free, finally, and with that the dam bursts. You howl, like a wounded, dying thing. You curse the Maw, the world, everything above and below. You wrench away part of the railing and fling it into the abyss. It clatters somewhere far below, down where the boy is. Where his body is.

When your strength finally leaves you, a wreck among wreckage, you collapse onto a seat, drained. You want to stop thinking about the boy. You want to stop seeing him fall.

The children. He wanted to save them (you wanted to save them, too). You need to… you need to save them. You latch onto that once more, refuse to linger on the boy (he’s  _ dead) _ , though he clings to the edges of every goal, every next step of the plan.

You climb to your feet and begin the ascent up those cursed stairs once more. The edge calls to you to gaze at it, to linger, but you put one foot in front of the other, firm, slow, steady. 

Those small, grey creatures linger around the final staircase, as though tempted by the sunlight, but afraid to move forward. You think, nonsensically, that maybe they’ll take care of the boy. They seem to be everywhere in the Maw. They’ll find him.

It offers some strange, silly comfort to think of him with them. Not alone.

You ascend the stairs, and as the doorway draws closer, you worry you won’t be able to fit through it -- but the thought fades quickly as you step onto the threshold. It’s not too small or too narrow. You fit through easily, stepping onto a small, sandy beach. It’s a strange dichotomy, like it shouldn’t be true, but also as though this is how it’s supposed to be.

Outside, the sun is high, and the wind splashes a fine mist of salt water across your face. A ship is in the distance, retreating toward the horizon. You’re, oddly, on what seems to be an island. A smokestack bellows fumes into the sky, and all around there’s nothing but calm water. It seems safe enough for the children.

Your eyes sting, and you lower them from the blinding sun. That’s when you see them. Footprints in the sand. Tiny.

You call out, but nobody responds, and there aren’t many places for even someone the size of a child to hide. Whoever these prints belong to is long gone. You can so easily imagine the boy’s small feet leaving them as he explores.

You sit down in the sand, staring at the horizon. (He should be here, with you, feeling the sun, marveling at the vast ocean.) 

Beside you, the footprints fade away underneath the onslaught of ocean breezes.


End file.
